News from AWS re:Invent – Docker Official Images on Amazon ECR Public

We are happy to announce today that, in partnership with Amazon, Docker Official Images are now available on AWS ECR Public. This is especially exciting because Docker Official Images are some of the most popularly used images on Docker Hub, acting as a key and trusted starting point for base images for the entire container ecosystem. Having them available on ECR Public, in addition to Docker Hub, makes it easier for Amazon customers to use these images conveniently and securely, and gives developers the flexibility to download Docker Official Images from their choice of registry.

The images are available to browse in the ECR Public gallery at https://gallery.ecr.aws/docker right now. You can pull the images by simply switching from using docker pull ubuntu:16.04 to docker pull public.ecr.aws/docker/library/ubuntu:16.04. We automatically push images to ECR Public when they are updated on Docker Hub so you will get all the latest releases wherever you pull from.

Note that while pulls from ECR Public do work from outside AWS, they are rate limited if not authenticated with an Amazon account, and you should generally use the Docker Hub addresses if you are pulling from outside AWS. Please see the ECR Public quotas documentation for more about how limits work with ECR Public.

If you are an AWS customer, pulling Docker Official Images from ECR Public offers several advantages. ECR Public is replicated across all AWS regions, so pulls are local to the region you pull from. This helps ensure lower latency for requests and ensures that all your resources are in the same failure zone, which is the recommended architectural pattern.

In addition, Amazon announced today a pull-through cache from ECR Public into your private registry that can be used even in a VPC that is connected with AWS PrivateLink and does not have external network connectivity to the public internet. This means that a security isolated infrastructure can still easily access the secure Docker Official Images that you need, without having to enable general internet access.

Docker also now has the AWS Graviton Ready designation from Amazon, which reflects how much work has gone into making Docker’s trusted content and Docker Official Images work across the Arm64 architecture that Graviton uses. We know that many of you use Graviton in production, and many also use these same images on Apple Silicon laptops, or on your Raspberry Pi. We are happy to continue to support this growing ecosystem.

We will be continuing to work together with Amazon to roll out more features to make it easier for you to work with Docker and AWS together, so please give us feedback in our public roadmap if there are things we can do to make your experience easier.

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